Goddamnit

My friend just made me cry with this. Thanks a lot.

"Do those things, god damnit, because nothing sucks worse than a girl who reads. Do it, I say, because a life in purgatory is better than a life in hell."

The Art of Manliness

There are things I do when you're not looking. There were lots of concerts, Nigerian afrobeats and hipster bands from Athens, and little coffeeshop shows and so much bourbon drinking, a 5am trip to Denny's. There were lots of snuck cigarettes, but no pack buying, and a return to the gym after finally maybe ridding my lungs of an infestation of green gooey cockroaches. A giant Buddy birthday cake with sparklers, and my sister's birthday too, and Nate's too, and taco trucks and a new favorite album. I know that last post was sort of a bummer one to leave up so long, but sometimes when serious things happen, you then need to spend the week reveling in non-serious things, and not overthinking them, or documenting them, or analyzing them. I just, well, you know. I don't want this to just become a place where you go to see what my social calendar's been looking like. Who cares? You've been doing things too. We've all been doing things. Cause it's May. Things get done in May.



One thing I did last night was go with some boys to Hot Sauce Williams for what Andrew called a "Polish Boy Standardization". We're on the hunt for the best Polish Boy in Cleveland, for the Cleveland Sandwich Board. I am going to be factual for a minute here, since so many of you are out of towners and have no idea what a Polish Boy is. Basically, you take a kielbasa, which is like the intestinal tract of Cleveland, stick it in a white bread bun (the soft underbelly), layer it with fries, pour on barbecue sauce, and crown it with coleslaw (the coleslaw representing the shiny blue eyeshadow a waitress puts on after work on the way to Happy Hour). Serve with wetnaps.

I think I've only had one before. I don't like to order messy food usually, because even unmessy food has a habit of going down my shirt. And this is the messiest.

My friend claimed to be a master of eating one in the car even, and showed me how to wrap the wax paper around it like a diaper. We started at Hot Sauce Williams cause it's the one everyone knows best, thanks to the weird Food Network, which I hold responsible for convincing Cleveland it's a foodie town. Someday they will be put on trial for that. Because now apparently we are? And it's their fault. Even as we sat down, it was made very clear to me this was not the *best* one, and thus should serve as a baseline for my homework assignment, which is Seti's.

This isn't about eating this thing though, which I *tried* to do. It ended up pretty much the way it ends up every time I try to eat a hot dog with too much stuff on it, me just eating the actual dog with a fork and halfheartedly poking at the gooey remains.

There was a discussion about a blog Andrew had seen, called the Art of Manliness. He was disgusted with it, subject matter being how to buy things and wear things and cut your hair. Kitchenware. The boys were put out, not manly! they claimed. Though I argue good kitchenware is incredibly manly. If by man we are referring to mankind. Which we should be. I think, see, that modern manliness has pretty much always been in reference to how much money you make, and what you spend it on. So a list of foppish accessories boys should buy if they feel like spending 50 bucks on hair care products seems very manly.

Anyway, here is a breakdown of the Perfect Polish Boy, in which I loosely connect the two topics.

1) Balance is Manly: I hate oversized sandwiches. I appreciate the idea that when you are broke, its awesome to get a huge roast beef monster which will provide you with at least 5 clone sandwiches, but unless you are using it as a supplement to grocery shopping, I like being able to fit the damn thing in my mouth. You should be able to get a bite with everything included in it. A little bit of outdoors, a little bit of nerd, a little bit of flirt, a little bit of serious. But I shouldn't have to deal with a whole mouthful of one ingredient at a time.

2) Good Barbecue Sauce is Manly: I mean, it's all over it. It's the public image of the sandwich. If it's too sweet or not spicy enough, you're gonna know immediately. But of course, whether or not a sauce is good is a matter of opinion. I prefer more vinegary sauces. No tomato bases.

3) Sturdy Reliable Bread is Manly: I hate when you pick up a hot dog or sausage sandwich and the bread immediately falls apart. That's basically like having the guy get drunk on the second date and start crying.

4) Good Kielbasa is Manly: If the core of the Polish Boy is lacking, then no matter how much sauce and coleslaw you put on top, it's not going to be good. How the kielbasa is cooked is extremely important. Do you want a mouthful of fatty sausage overflowing with meat juice? Or do you want it deep fried and crispy? I personally like to microwave my kielbasa until the outside starts to radioactively char. This either means I prefer men that have survived figurative fires, or that I deep down don't really like stuffed meat in casings. Maybe it means I like space robots.

5) Coleslaw Being Runny is Not Manly: it's an accessory, and not the most important part, but without that layer of crisp and cool, the Polish Boy ceases to be. If the star of your coleslaw is the dressing, then basically I'm going to get a hot dog covered in mayo. Not cool. Don't try so hard coleslaw. Just be basic and timeless, some chopped up cabbage with a little bit of flair. True story: some of us really only started eating coleslaw at all just a few years ago. The more it reminds us of the cloying mess you can get from a deli counter, the more we start to think our previous anti-coleslaw policy was warranted. In this case, deli coleslaw equals Ed Hardy shirts, and the further you are from that the better.

Just so you know, the Hot Sauce Williams Polish Boy is NOT MANLY.

------
@EvenMoreSarah:

Quick, help me me fake slightly-deeper-than-superficial knowledge of Chicago.

@BridgetCallahan:

"The gentrification of Logan Square has led to several stand up comics being priced out of the neighborhood,"

"Cleveland was founded in 1796. Chicago was founded in 1797, when all the cool people left to start bars."

"In Chicago, there is currently a petition to move the lake North, to stop fucking with the out of towners."

"Did you know once there were stockyards there? TRUE STORY."

Some Not Very Well Thought Out Commentary

A lot of my friends don't understand Twitter. And I've heard from more than one guy I've met "You use facebook a lot, don't you?" Yes, yes I do.

But every time there's something big happening, I appreciate Twitter more and more. When the earthquake and tsunami happened in Japan, I knew immediately because of Twitter, and got to watch it live on tv at 3am here. I would have never known otherwise, because I don't sit around late at night with CNN on. I generally have better things to do at 3am, like peeling off my nail polish or memorizing the lyrics to Uptown Girl. I don't however have anything better to do than watch oil refineries explode and cargo ships overturn. None of you do. Except maybe anyone living in Japan at that time.

Sunday night I got the heads up from Twitter at 10 that the President was going to make a big announcement, and no one knew what it was. I dutifully turned on MSNBC at 10:30, and was subjected to half an hour of two anchors sitting there going "I don't know what to talk about, so I'll just talk about how nice the White House Correspondence Dinner was. Haha, wasn't that stuff about Trump funny?" No one at that point honestly knew what the announcement was going to be, and that's always scary, to have the entire nation waiting for something unknown and awful. Simultaneously boring and terrifying. It could have been anything! Hillary Clinton is Dead! Alien Ship Found! Putin Nuking China! Asteroid Headed for Earth! Intelligent Life Discovered at the Bottom of the Ocean! Antarctica Falls Completely in the Sea - South America Wiped Out!

Oh but it was none of those things. No, instead it was the announcement that Osama Bin Laden had been killed. Yawn. I don't care. I turned the tv to the saved episode of Dr. Who from last night. If there was a negative space of caring, that's where I would be. The Care Vacuum. The Black Hole of Care.

That's not entirely accurate. Like, I'm into the rest of the story, especially the part where people act crazy and weird and relieved, and then tweet like a million things about it, and all go out to Times Square and party a lot and scream things in costume. And then all the comedians I follow on Twitter spent the next two hours coming up with every funny thing they could think of about this weird symbolic victory. And the other 40% of people got all "this doesn't change anything assholes", and everyone else was like "stop being party poopers!" and that's pretty much the same pattern Twitter falls into anytime anything happens. Royal Weddings. Lady Gaga shows. Libya.

Here are some of my favorite tweets from Sunday night:

@BridgetCallahan Deep down in the seat of my soul, I resent David Gregory for taking away my hope Obama was going to announce he found an alien ship.

@SmartBitches That sound you hear is a million Tea Partiers taking their suicide pills because they don't know what to believe anymore.

@rilaws HOLY SHIT: http://twitpic.com/4s6wcl

@alwysabridesmd: "Does this mean we can stop bombing the shit out of people now?"

@mollylambert Obama's presidency just became Blazing Saddles

@jumonsmapes I'm ready for you to TURN ON THE FUCKING NEWS. RT @ladygaga Are monsters ready for me to announce the premiere of The Judas Video?

@billytwitty 2011: US allows gays into the army. Later in 2011: US army kills bin laden. WELL DONE GAY PEOPLE!

@iamcaroline I fucking WISH they would blast party in the usa and throw miley cyrus bong hits videos up on every screen in times square right now

@simonpegg There's a slight sense in the more sensationalist media that the world just completed a particularly tricky video game.

@kellyoxford Tom Clancy has been jerking off all morning

@SethMacFarlane Never celebrate after destroying a small enemy spaceship, ‘cause someone’s about to point off-screen and say “Oh. My. God.”

@BridgetCallahan I just got spam for a prepaid credit card called BillMyParentsLater. I'm so in love with the Internet right now it hurts.

So yup, that's what I did that night, that's my experience of this national moment, glib lines the like of which you could hear at any amateur stand up comedy open mic night. Other people I follow kept complaining about super patriotic crazy people being super patriotic crazy and how awful Twitter and Facebook were. I only have a few people in my feed who bothered with the "America! Fuck yeah!" shit. So I went searching for it. Because you know what I love about the Internet? I love how horrible and beautiful and all inclusively immediate it is. It's not just stupid crazy people. It's not just smart reasonable people. It's EVERYTHING. ALL AT ONCE and ALL THE TIME. Social media has shown me the Great Horror, the gigantic black squid squeezing the juice out of the world, and I can't stop looking at it and being constantly entertained all the time by it's straight up what the fuckness. It's like Stockholm Syndrome, only like, more awesome.

Example: This tweet of mine
"@BridgetCallahan Nobody ever gives me credit for all the times I'm not a drunk slut."
got as many retweets as this tweet:
"@BridgetCallahan Dear US: Now that you're hungover, let me run this by you: Affordable alternative energy, free health care, let my friends get married."

Noticeable different in quality and intent, but the Internet doesn't care. It just wants to eat it all and spit it up in everyone's mouth equally.

Maybe this is all a reaction to the fact I can't take anything the real world does seriously anymore.

A lot of my friends and family, their reaction was "it's awful to be so jubilant about death, it's unchristian, it's barbaric." Oh, I get that. If I had any sort of reaction to this besides entertained observer, I would probably agree. But I forgive everyone living in NYC, and everyone who lost someone. I'm happy for them. I don't think the rest of the country ought to give as much of a fuck, they are just like me, buying into bread and circuses, but the people who lived there? No, go for it. That happened to your city. I see the bloodthirsty glee on their faces and I understand that, and I don't want to take that away from them. You can understand without condoning. You can watch without judging. You want to get into a moral argument with me, fine. I'll probably shut right up. Just keep in mind that whole "It's not Christian or Buddhist or Bible approved" thing isn't going to fly with me. If someone killed my brother, I'd feel pretty good about them being shot after evading capture for 10 years and that whole time trying to kill more people. Something being wrong doesn't stop you from feeling it, and don't press me on the difference between that guy and lots of other *ahem* world leaders, cause I know it ain't much.

All of you in the rest of the country need to calm the fuck down though. And the next person who compares Osama to Hitler will get punched in the face.

May 1st was also my sister's birthday, one of my best friend's birthday, International Workers Day, Beltane. As Carrie put it at dinner last night "And May 1st continues to be this weird nexus of historical significance for no apparent reason."

Things to Say to the Next Old Lady Who Fucks with Me at the Grocery Store, Specifically Heinens

It’s important that you realize there is literally nothing you can do to stop me. This was a foregone conclusion the minute I woke up, and maybe in fact the minute I learned to walk, the second I took my first breath outside my mothers wet warm uterus. Your first mistake was existing in the same world I do. Your second mistake was allowing me to learn your name. You know the reason you can’t stop me? Because I believe I am better than you. Better looking, smarter, cunning and resourceful, more interesting at parties. Because I believe this, and because my mind is tuned to the frequency of the universe which allows everything I believe to come true, it is therefore true. A weaker individual cannot stop a stronger one. I am better at sex than you. I am also better at kissing. I handle my liquor better. I believe in my smile, and when I smile at people they believe in me, because I understand that’s how it works. My brain can conceive of five possible solutions before you’ve even figured out where your keys are. My genes are naturally resistant to stupidity. I never get a bad haircut. People like you see the world the way you do because people like me tell you how to. This is the way the world was designed, you cannot change that just because you are at a disadvantage.You may go home and scoff at me to your friends, you may mock my face or my words or the fact there are no hubcaps on my car, but your denial of the truth does not make it any less true. I have already won by sheer factual superiority. I will simply have a much better life than you. So give the fuck up and move your fucking cart.

PS I have a motherfucking dinosaur at home. It eats stars for the sugar and old ladies for the fiber.

I Am a Terrible Promoter Because I Forget About Things Like My Etsy Shop

Today I just lowered all the prices, and you get free shipping AND free baby unicorns to the first 100 customers.

Only they will probably be dead because I have to ship them.
I mean, I'll poke air holes, but there's still the being tossed around and rained on and trucked and trained.
I've also heard baby unicorns can survive three days without food or water once they hatch, but that seems sort of optimistic.
If you see me soon, ask me about the Massacre at the Pearl Rd. Post Office.

Also, I'm not really giving away baby unicorns.
But please go buy stuff anyway.

Now I Will Attempt As Accurate A Description As Possible And Fail

There were tornado warnings, and the wind was heavy and wicked and large. I drove up with some Steves to Pittsburgh, because what's a trip there these days? My territory has expanded itself, pushing through the hills and toll roads like my life is too large these days to fit in the old limits. I will emotionally piss on all cities between me and the oceans, they will become mine.

Years ago I had seen Mogwai at the Beachland, and if you ask me to name my favorite concerts ever, that's on the list and when I tell you it is, you will see me shiver a little, remembering how frozen in place I was the minute it started. Closing my eyes and remembering the feeling standing up right against the speaker left to stage, and the guitars electrocuting me through a hand laid on the black wood casing. I remember the feeling of that show better than I remember most sex. I have a glow in my chest when I think of it. I love the Beachland for that show like I love the feel of motel room sheets.

And somehow I ended up right against that speaker again, only in a different place and time. I tried to move back and away, I really did. I said "this is going to make me deaf". But by the middle of the show, without even realizing it, my body had gravitated right back there, a junkie's body, the desire totally in control and ear drums fuck off. The justification of whatever, it's one show, I'll give up a year of hearing later in order to stand here with the song slamming into me, real and concrete as a jump on my chest, as a very large thing shaking me, and me powerless and hungry and desperate for it to be harder and louder. I couldn't even move of my own volition, I was paralyzed by this wall of sound, a deer being kissed by headlights and doom and a knife being slipped into a lung, and my stomach turned up in tight little knots, and I didn't know if I was going to throw up or come. It's a drug, a thick steel reverberating coffin, led by this little smiling soccer hooligan who kept going to the mike after each song and saying "thanks, cheers!" and I have to believe he knows exactly what this feels like and that's why he's so happy, reveling in the slaves he's created just by playing an instrument. For exactly the time and the length of them playing Like Herod, I would have done absolutely anything and everything that Englishman asked me to.

Afterwards, as the last encore song was dying down, I stood outside against the church wall, in the light rain, and I smoked a cigarette. I wasn't supposed to but I did. I haven't done it again today, but I don't regret it last night. I fell asleep in the car, and when I woke up to drive home from Euclid at 4am, the wind was even stronger and there were whole trees lying across the road, and I think that what I was feeling at that show is what made that happen. The echoes of it ripped across the Midwest.

Things I Would Be Able to Do If I Were A Spy And/Or Assassin

If I were a spy and/or a genetically engineered assassin, I would have perfect teeth. It would not matter how much coffee or red wine or cigars or blueberries I ate, they would always be shining white because they would be covered with a stain resistant alloy. My pant pleats would always fall perfectly without me having to learn how to or even buy an iron. The tips of my fingernails would cut you like fishing wire. My cellphone would contain the code to decrypt all state secrets in Bjork songs. I would wash my hair only twice a week, but it would maintain a healthy buoyancy. I would have ten different apartments, in ten different international cities, with ten different boxes of hair color in each one. I would always carry a Lands End Royal blue backpack, and inside would be an ax, a hammer, a cb radio, toothpicks, cotton bandages, five different sized flashlights, and two bottles of very rare Haitian rum. Also a photo of a small ugly child.



I would be able to break someone's neck with the same amount of force it takes to open a jar of pickles. My skills at hacking into orbiting satellites would be renown in Brooklyn and Portland. All of my credit cards would be black, marked with unknown Indonesian banks, and would work at every ATM. You would not be able to see my reflection. My enemies would be able to identify me with the slightest whiff of roses, but only long after I was gone. I would never drink tea.

My true love would a lockpicker and document forger in the Ukraine named Elvis, who has a dying wife. We would meet for coffee in Instanbul and never touch. Whenever I needed a new identity, I would send him a dove with code wrapped around her foot, and only he would know what the seemingly random pictures of kittens meant. His wife would also be blind. Later, he would go blind too, and I would live with him in a small cottage on a desolate Spanish rock, where he would write books in Braille about the unfairness of a well lived life.



My favorite spot in the world would be the very southern point of the South American continent. It would be the only place anyone could see my natural hair color, and the birthmark left there by the research facility that raised me to survive in space.

I would not own a boat or a plane or a train or a helicopter, but I would be able to use one whenever I needed, through contacts made in my prior life as a world famous rock bassist. Everyone that met me would fall in love with me, and be doomed to compare all other people's collarbones with mine unsatisfactorily. My arch nemesis would be a 19 year old boy living in an abandoned resort on the Black Sea, who believes I killed his father. I would know I have to kill him one day, but would avoid him because of his eyes, which look exactly like mine.



Every time I died, I would be reactivated in the Congo.
I would own cardigans in every color known to the human eye.
A nomadic tribe in Tibet would hold my mail.
My wrists would be too small for any handcuffs.
I would be an expert on Turkish novelists.
17 men would be unable to kill me. Not one of them would survive to report my gender or height or timbre of my voice.
Occasionally, I would amuse myself by writing scathing social essays for the New Yorker, but just to let my parents know I was still alive.
I would have a scar running from my left breast all the way down to the hollow of my hipbone, but it would be from a polar bear.

Days of Significance

That's Carrie's Easter Gin Martini. She swears it goes well with foil wrapped chocolate.

Easter is magical even to us hard souled ne'er-do-wells because it is a combination of all things important to little infantile hearts: Tragic Mythical Death at the hands of Villains, Flowers, Fancy Chocolate in Shapes you can only get once a year, and Fuzzy Baby Animals. Any holiday with this combination is guaranteed to be a success.


Possible New Holiday Ideas: Martin Luther King Day, with black and white chain shaped candies, lots of magnolias, baby doves.


Anne Boleyn Day: red roses, hard candies in the shape of royal jewels (we could wear them!), cocker spaniel puppies.


Ghandi Day: Lotus blossoms, cow shaped caramels, peacocks and calves.

John Lennon Day: Dandelions, pink colored sugar elephants and peanut butter filled globes, kittens.

Chico Mendes Day: Orchids, cinnamon and chili spiced Brazil shaped chocolates, baby parrots. Cause adult parrots are sort of scary.


Euripides Day: peonies, almond and pistachio wafers shaped like dogs, baby lambs and goats.


Tsar Nicholas II Day: Chamomiles and daisies, white chocolate revolvers and horses, bear cubs.

Detroit, Darling, You.

Lately this is my experience outside of Cleveland: these gray rainy places are growing tentacles and groping at me as I speed on past. But not in the shiny collectible way they were before, all fun and games. Instead in this sincere desperate shoving pressing grope, like the cities want to crawl on me and inside me and just snuggle up all round in my warm intestines. Yeah, that's what it's like, it's like a cat stuck outside in April. Millvale and Toledo and Akron and Detroit and Youngstown. Strays that I've been feeding and now they're expecting the next step. And maybe that's right, maybe I'm meant to be moving down the circles of decay, find new wet gritty corners. Maybe I notice the groping and grasping because I'm so ready to fall in love with something new I'm falling in love with everything.

Also I think it's funny how many people I've known in my life with the last name Jones, and they've all been decent sorts. Wendy and Nate and Sarah. So this is what happened. Sarah got these tickets for the Pixies in Detroit, and Perren couldn't go, so I went because it takes nothing, literally nothing, to convince me to go to Detroit. I fucking love Detroit. It's so goddamn blue and gray, all of it, always. So we made this mad rush, and got there in plenty of time, and talked about stuff and made plans. We go over the Great Sailboat Bridge, and I'm all like Sarah, watch and tell me if you see Michigan get flatter, and she does! Cause it does it immediately. I'm getting a little obsessed with this idea of state borders, that the whole terrain changes so drastically along these little thin lines I had believed were basically arbitrary. And of course if I had thought that through all the way, I would have long ago realized the subtleties of them not being arbitrary at all, but that was a theme this night, the realizations of obvious but not necessarily important things. Point is, I can tell when I'm in Ohio, or Pennsylvania, or Michigan, or Indiana. The trees are all different, the low bushes too. In Michigan for instance, along the border and into the city are all these little thick dark pointy trees, that give the place the look of an orchard. It's real lake country, not just part of it like Ohio, but all of it. It's marshy and northerly. The color scheme is cargo ship.



She failed to mention that this was the Doolittle Anniversary Tour, and they were going to play the entire album, like in entirety. Once she mentioned that, my chest just sort of jumped and seized up and stayed that way, which is what happens when I get excited of course, and that's the feeling I go searching for every day. Being really excited and filled with anticipation is the absolute best most addictive feeling, and I wonder if that's why I don't watch horror movies because it's the same physical reaction as being scared right? Only without wanting to think about it over and over again for days.

I thought I had been the Fox theater before when Belle and Sebastian came, but now I wonder, because this theater is so very shiny and decked out, I feel sure I would have remembered that. But that show was a long time ago, and we had a whole group that had been sitting on the van floor for hours, and we were young and way less comfortable in our skins, so far less prone to look around and notice things like hidden windows. Turned out the seats Sarah got were Row A, which wasn't orchestra pit but right before it, and we were basically 6 rows from the stage in a packed theater of 5,000. That's a power rush itself. Though I do wonder about who spends 150 on a seat when you can be the 6th row for 60? Where's the real difference there? These guys in front of us kept turning around and waving imperiously at the peasants. I would have thrown a beer at them in a more productive life. I had quite enough beer soaking into my leather boots though, running like a little hillside creek down the seats to pool at the railing. The show was so good, I didn't care, and didn't even notice till we left.

First it was some B Sides, then all of Doolittle, and then like three sets of encores that were basically an entire other concert. The whole place full of 30 year olds and forty year olds screaming and laughing, something you don't get to see enough of in the real world. People had dressed up for the nineties. All gathered together in huge groups of friends they had known since high school, having planned this night in advance the carpooling and the calling off work and stuff. The young ones, who could usually be found isolated and aloof in corners on their phones, stood out like sore self aware thumbs.



I think I would have taped every minute of that show, except I consciously kept telling myself to put the fucking camera down asshole. BUT IT WAS SO GOOD. Like, these clips don't even begin to do it justice, because I had planned to tape these songs, and I Love You was the crowning moment of the night but it was too late, I was already into it. U-Mass too. I did record Debaser, it's on my youtube if you wanna watch, but the it's not as good a recording. But it does sort of show you that jump of OH THE ALBUM'S BEGINNING.



After the show, I waited in the lobby while Sarah braved the merch table for 30 minutes. A guy who was either crazy or drunk walked by me, could have been either really. Didn't look crazy, but then he stopped and turned around and got really up in my face and said very seriously "I'm a poet and I have two published books and you, you have the bluest eyes. Your eyes are just swimmable." See, that first part of the sentence? Definitely crazy right? And he didn't leave. He just stood there looking at me, and giving me his number, and talking in his sort of sane drunken charmingly fracture way that I did actually like against my best judgement. Which was fun, but at one point he asked if he could touch my chin, and I was like sure. He cupped my chin in his hand, and lifted it up just a bit to look me in the eyes. "It's not just that they're blue, they're also almond shaped, they have this dip. Oh that dip! And your eyebrows, you have the most complete eyebrows. And a little pug nose. You're so beautiful." Then he just went back to talking about nonsense, and would stop again and stare again and then run off to his friends and then run back. It was the most flattering drunk attention from a stranger I've ever had, but it crazy. He asked if he could kiss my neck and I said uh uh, no, I've been sick, I'm covered in sick, and then he asked if we'd come have a drink at the casino and I declined cause we had to go back to Cleveland, but you know what drunk or crazy man? You were cute enough. If I didn't have to work, I would have stayed and had a drink. I did give him my number. I said to myself, at the very least some crazy guy can entertain me on the phone every once in a while. I'm back into talking on the phone these days, not texting or emailing, but like talking for a while. I missed that a lot it turns out.

The lesson here is I am the world's biggest sucker for compliments. There has never been a girl more willing to listen to what you like about me than me.

After Michigan tried to kiss me, Ohio tried to drown us in thunder and glass as we slid our way home, over the sailboat bridge and past the chemical plants with American flags painted on their sides, and billboard for strip clubs and dark lit scrap yards with mysterious flames and miles and miles of wet wet road.



More photos from the concert here.

Cracking the Mysteries of the Ages

This had better be my last day being sick. I feel like it is. My voice still sounds hauntingly like a 95 yr old asthmatic, and the stuff coming out of my lungs is this particular shade of sea foam green yellow, that I imagine Betty Draper will be painting her kitchen in about two seasons. But I'm so restless, and that's a good sign. Like, I just want to DO stuff. Only not anything that involves talking to people or being responsible for any fine motor functions. Later I'm going to eat the spiciest Thai food I can find, to try and jumpstart my senses into working. This morning, it took me till 1 in the afternoon to realize I hadn't brushed my teeth since yesterday.

Since I couldn't think of anything real to post about, but didn't want to leave that weed post up as my last entry cause I fear it leaves the wrong impression of me to newcomers (I may have already sabotaged this effort with that teeth confession), here's another no photo throw away post from the sickbed. Have I mentioned inhalers are like, the most amazing invention ever? After morning after pills, coffee liquor, and marshmallow eggs, of course.

ANSWERS TO ANCIENT QUESTIONS THAT I HAVE NOT THOUGHT VERY MUCH ABOUT:

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

This is a trick question. The real question is how no one could be around? What have you done to your forest to kill it so completely that there are no birds, or insects, or small woodland vermin? There is always someone around in the forest. You don't even need to be in the forest. There are like seven raccoons living in my garage. So the correct answer here is: always assume someone is listening. And recording. Or eating your garbage.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Eating eggs is gross. I mean, I still do it, but they are gross. You are eating undeveloped fetus juice, fried hard. Ugh. That dropped literally out of somethings uterus. (I'm generalizing here, I don't really think it's called a uterus, but same concept, someplace inside an animal that's a warm dark incubator for sex juice. Oh wait, I just looked it up and it's totally called a uterus.) Full grown chickens are gross too, they are mean carnivorous vicious tiny dinosaurs who will eat absolutely anything, including tape. I once had my finger bitten by a goose at the zoo, and geese are just chickens on steroids. Also I read that scene in Mama Day where the guy gets killed by the chickens, and I suspect that was a true story, which is just another reason why I will never whitewash anything ever.

The best phase of chickenhood is when they are just chicks. Sort of like how Pikachu was always cutest before he evolved. Chicks are adorable. They are fuzzy and skittish and impossibly crushable.

The correct answer here is: the egg. Duh.

What goes on four legs in the morning, on two legs at noon, and on three legs in the evening?

Sarah's mini-greyhound Maurice. Sometimes he uses no feet at all.




What is the room you leave without entering? The Maproom.
That's a bar downtown.

What is the room you enter without leaving? The kitchen at any house party ever.